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For the conquest of Iwo Jima, the Marine Corps assigned three divisions, a total of almost 70,000 troops, in stark contrast to the single division tasked with capturing Guadalcanal in August 1942. The conquest of Iwo Jima took five weeks, far beyond the American estimates.
The main Japanese naval opposition within the invasion area came from hundreds of Imperial Japanese Navy Shin'yō-class suicide motorboats and Maru-Ni Imperial Japanese Army attack boats. Since the Japanese air arm had been equally decimated by this point in the war, the lack of trained and experienced pilots led them to deploy the kamikaze ...
The lessons learned on Iwo Jima served as guidelines for the Battle of Okinawa in April 1945, and influenced American planning for an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. For example, on Okinawa, "because of the casualties taken at Iwo Jima on the first day, it was decided to make the preparatory bombardment the heaviest yet delivered on to a ...
Landing beaches on Okinawa. The American invasion of the island of Okinawa, codenamed Operation Iceberg, took place 1 April 1945. The Japanese military was determined to inflict a casualty rate so high that the U.S. government would choose not to invade the Japanese home islands.
The campaign took place in the Volcano and Ryukyu island groups. The two main land battles in the campaign were the Battle of Iwo Jima (16 February to 26 March 1945) and the Battle of Okinawa (1 April to 21 June 1945). One major naval battle occurred, called Operation Ten-Go (7 April 1945) after the operational title given to it by the Japanese.
Iwo Jima has a history of minor volcanic activity a few times per year (fumaroles, and their resultant discolored patches of seawater nearby). [20] In November 2015 Iwo Jima was placed first in a list of ten dangerous volcanoes, with volcanologists saying there was a one in three chance of a large eruption from one of the ten this century.
At this time the Iwo Jima invasion was expected to be a brief prologue to the main campaign, with relatively light casualties; King assumed that Nimitz would be able to reuse three of the Marine Corps divisions assigned to Iwo Jima for the attack on Okinawa, which was originally scheduled to take place just forty days later.
The Lions of Iwo Jima: The Story of Combat Team 28 and the Bloodiest Battle in Marine Corps History. Henry Holt and Company, L.L.C. ISBN 978-0-8050-8325-5. Rottman, Gordon L. (2002). U.S. Marine Corps World War II Order of Battle: Ground and Air Units in the Pacific War, 1939–1945. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-31906-5